Essena O’Neill, 18, who had 612,000 followers, had rewritten the captions on many of the images, explaining she was being paid to promote clothes and drinks, and had taken some of the selfies more than 100 times to get the right stomach-sucked-in shot. O’Neill said the pictures “served no real purpose other than self-promotion”.

The Australian teen has started her own site, letsbegamechangers.com, to promote “veganism, plant-based nutrition, environmental awareness, social issues, gender equality, [and] controversial art”.

It features a button that users can press to donate to O’Neill’s new venture. In one tearful video posted on the site, the teenager admitted she had been struggling to make ends meet.

“I can’t afford rent right now,” she said. “It’s like I’m just embarrassed to admit that I need help ... if you like my videos or like any of my posts or you like this website, if this is of value to you, then yeah, please support me because I can’t afford my own real life.”

She also appealed for “professional help and expertise” to help her maintain her website.

The media storm created by O’Neill’s rejection of social media appears to have paid off in promotional reach, with more than 6,000 people signing up to the forum.

“This photo would have taken at least 30 minutes of shooting to find the right white background, to check my posing, to yell some more at my sister for not ‘doing it how I wanted’. The whole process of photo-taking back then was for one purpose: to get likes,” she wrote.

In the caption she explained her decision to quit social media for good, as well as spending the last fortnight wearing no makeup. “And then just like that I decided I don’t need social media at all,” she wrote. “So I quit everything … I can’t tell you how free I feel. Never again will I let a number define me.

“Everyone’s doing it. We just keep putting up staged photos in desperate hopes others will approve. I have a lot to learn … but I am enough. I am already everything I want to be … it lives inside of me. Not on a screen.”

On Tuesday night, two of O’Neill’s fellow Instagram celebrities, twins Nina and Randa Nelson, expressed scepticism about the motivation behind her decision to leave social media, in a video which called her change of heart a publicity stunt.

In a forum post on her site, O’Neill said she would not engage with the accusations. “I had a great time with them [the Nelson twins] but I was also extremely lost in the ‘celebrity construct’,” she wrote. “I wish they would have come to me personally, not share intimate details of my life. But this is my exact point about social media. People say gossip and rumours to avoid the real problems.”